Edward Weston viewed the camera as an objective instrument that functioned without the photographer’s bias or intervention. Through photography, he believed, one could access deeper truths about nature. Six years before this photograph was taken, Weston explained that his philosophy of photographing the landscape was “to become identified with nature, to know things in their very essence, so that what I record is not an interpretation—my idea of what nature should be—but a revelation or a piercing of the smokescreen artificially cast over life by irrelevant, humanly limited exigencies, into an absolute, impersonal recognition.”